Gagliardi
- UNCG Author/Contributor (non-UNCG co-authors, if there are any, appear on document)
- Michael Bohen (Creator)
- Institution
- The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG )
- Web Site: http://library.uncg.edu/
- Advisor
- Fred Chappell
Abstract: This thesis is composed of the single novella 'Gagliardi" the germ of which was lodged in my head for over two years before I found a suitable way to release it. I had long imagined the prototype of the main character, who was in a heterosexual bind like Gagliardi, in a situation similar to the one which Mitch has to face in A Streetcar Named Desire; this was the what-if quality of my original, rather simple conception. The way to tell the story came to me in a flash while I was working in a sheet metal factory in Minnesota in the summer of 1971. First person narration was the only way to get my fictional juices flowing and to capture the repressed vitality of the main character. Things had finally opened up for me as they do for Gagliardi. Although a number of readers have found Gagliardi to be unsympathetic, I intended otherwise. Gagliardi will be sympathetic to the extent that the reader can empathize with the acuteness of his identity crisis vis-à-vis his repressive upbringing and environment towards which he feels so ambivalent. Red and Pete are naturally more sympathetic because they have less to learn about human suffering, but they are also involved in similar identity crises. The novella, then, can be seen as a dialectic, in a sense, between main characters who have arrived at varying degrees of compromise with or freedom from their upbringings and environments.
Gagliardi
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Created on 1/1/1973
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Additional Information
- Publication
- Thesis
- Language: English
- Date: 1973